Cyborgs and Science Fiction

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

In her oft-cited “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway conceptualizes the cyborg as a feminist possibility, emphasizing the need for a self-created, self-engendered female (150). In How We Became Posthuman (1999), N. Katherine Hayles examines the development of cybernetic theory from the 1940s to the present, linking its history to portrayals of cyborgs and artificial intelligence in science fiction. I argue that the combination of change and tradition embodied by Brazilian cyborgs must be understood within the history and paradigms of Latin American culture and its ambivalent attitudes towards modernity. To understand Brazil’s female cyborgs, I apply Bolívar Echeverría’s concept of the Latin American “baroque ethos,” which acts a form of resistance to capitalism in the works by Caio Fernando Abreu, Roberto de Sousa Causo and João Paulo Cuenca, whose female cyborgs question or refute societal expectations, while searching for acceptance in romantic partnerships or family structures. The presence of female cyborgs in Brazil during distinct moments of economic and technological change—from the period of the military dictatorship and state sponsored industrialization in the 1970s to the contemporary digital global economy in the 2000s—illustrates how cyborg body functions as feminized avatars of labor, mourning, survival and resistance.

Since science and technology are intertwined with literature, a great number of writers have created different depictions under the label of Science Fiction which mostly shows various aspects of future human, life, culture, and society. Science Fiction will be exemplified through a number of notable Science Fiction stories in this paper; afterwards, it will outline various notable critics' notions about future forms of humans including cyborg, transhuman and posthuman, to examine two goals of immortality and superiority in Science Fiction. In sum, this is a literary review paper which presents an overview on Science Fiction and offers a broad discussion on the transformations including cyborg, transhuman and posthuman to distinguish these concepts from each other: transhuman as a transcended human, posthuman as an obsolete human, and cyborg as a machine man.

We are witnessing a transition in epochs: from the
Anthropocene, in which human activities shaped our environment, to
what I call the "Automacene" -the epoch that machines will direct
what we do and how we do it.
My research findings indicates that there's 60 percent chance the
revolution will be capable of completing "all human tasks" by 2040,
allowing humans to move to a trans-humanist society. Further, the
research reflects what it means to be human in the age of technology
and artificial intelligence "Cyborgs, Robots, Machines...etc.".
By researching how does the artificial intelligence and how does
human intelligence can affect the environment in reworking and
adapting it to their own needs, we can conclude that the Anthropocene
is reshaping our planet in profound ways. Scientific research reflects
that the changes that have occurred in the last 50 to 200 years have
led scientists to investigate about the anthropogenic and the
transhumanist impacts on the Earth

We are witnessing a transition in epochs: from the
Anthropocene, in which human activities shaped our environment, to
what I call the "Automacene" -the epoch that machines will direct
what we do and how we do it.
My research findings indicates that there's 60 percent chance the
revolution will be capable of completing "all human tasks" by 2040,
allowing humans to move to a trans-humanist society. Further, the
research reflects what it means to be human in the age of technology
and artificial intelligence "Cyborgs, Robots, Machines...etc."

First things first: this is not a course in science fiction. There’s nothing wrong with science fiction, but this course is going to look at the subject of hybrid humanity from a different angle. Some of the works on our list have often (and rightly) been characterized as science fiction, but we’re going to look at them not as speculative works that offer a revised version of the present and future, but rather as works that philosophically question some of the fundamental presumptions of the boundary between the human and the superhuman along the lines of the Jewish folkloric figure of the golem. We’ll begin by reviewing the history and development of the golem, particularly as in relation to the mythic history surrounding Rabbi Judah Loew in sixteenth-century Prague. Then we’ll move forward in time to look at how recent writers have incorporated artificial humans into their fictions at moments when “ordinary” humanity is perceived as inadequate and also at the consequences that they suggest follow hard upon the heels of such attempts at transcending our nature

Since science and technology are intertwined with literature, a great number of writers have created different depictions under the label of Science Fiction which mostly shows various aspects of future human, life, culture, and society. Science Fiction will be exemplified through a number of notable Science Fiction stories in this paper; afterwards, it will outline various notable critics' notions about future forms of humans including cyborg, transhuman and posthuman, to examine two goals of immortality and superiority in Science Fiction. In sum, this is a literary review paper which presents an overview on Science Fiction and offers a broad discussion on the transformations including cyborg, transhuman and posthuman to distinguish these concepts from each other: transhuman as a transcended human, posthuman as an obsolete human, and cyborg as a machine man.

This paper explores the figure of "the avatar" in James Cameron’s 2009 film as an expression of posthumanism distinct from that articulated by Donna Harraway in her 1985 essay, "The Cyborg Manifesto." The avatar icon is a useful illustration of a unique shift in the posthumanist paradigm as an indexical creation, custom made for both user and context.

After an exploration of the film unique technological fantasies, both hopeful and fearsome, as well as its pronounced ecological anxiety; this paper concludes that the haptic, in particular, is asked to compensate for a reinvigorated existential anxiety in the contemporary multimedia monitoring practice. Tracing this trend through the film’s diegesis and digital 3D technology, I argue that haptic experience treads a liminal space between the medial economy and embodiment in posthuman subjectivity of the early 2000s.

This article focuses on the cyborg body in contemporary Mexican science fiction, contrasting it with its depiction in other countries of Latin America. Beginning in the 1990s, Mexican science fiction authors write stories about implants and neo-cyborgs, anticipating Alex Rivera's portrait of "cybraceros" in his (2008) film Sleep Dealer by nearly a decade. The defiant cyborgs of Mexico are distinct from those of the Southern Cone, where they relate most often to torture and unresolved political issues from the period of re-democratization, and from those of Brazil, where they are related to issues of race and urbanization. While in Mexico and Brazil the cyborg is often used as a critique of neoliberal policies and the privatization of public industries, the insistence on the embodiment of cyborgs in Mexico is often tied to labor and border issues, problematizing the idea of cyborg-mestizaje or hybridity. Heriberto Yepez questions concepts of hybridity that diminish the inherent sense of difference and struggle through a discourse of conciliation. The Mexican cyborg figure that insists on the importance of its body time and again demonstrates its resistance to facile notions of political and cybernetic hybridity.

De klimaatalarmisten en natuurgekkies onder ons demoniseren de technologie, verheerlijken de natuur en schetsen een dystopisch toekomstscenario. Maar wij zijn inmiddels tot cyborg geëvolueerd, tot hybride van mens en machine. En in het cyborg-tijdperk zijn de grenzen tussen het natuurlijke en kunstmatige vervaagd, zoals Yvonne Faber dat in haar essay Cyborgs drinken geen natuurwijn aan het voorbeeld van de natuurwijn illustreert. Ter ondersteuning voor haar betoog beroept Faber zich op A Cyborg Manifesto van Donna Haraway. Op dit betoog valt echter wel wat af te dingen.

Die künstliche Intelligenz hat eine dauerhafte Präsenz in der Filmwelt und verkörpert unsere Gesellschaften im Spannungsfeld zwischen Interesse, Enthusiasmus, Skepsis und Angst
gegenüber Technologien, die der Mensch erschafft und die ihn umgeben. Bilder des
Hollywood-Kinos existieren neben Produktionen jeglichen Genres, von Sci-Fi zum
Melodram, die unser Leben in intimer Weise von Maschinen gesteuert darstellen.

The action of the bowels (a violent pressure, as if the whole intestines were being expelled) is an aggressive kind of biological mourning—turned on the self, yet also directed to the… internal/external, incorporated/masticated object .

Elizabeth's phantastical configuration of “savage responses of the bowel” , the mechanisms of the inner body, shows the dysphoric and impassioned motions and responses of and by the restless intramural organs with certain restraints: they function through the body fluid towards the external sphere for the bodies, which could ventilate the bodies or create the turntable possibilities from the inside out, surging, the none stop throbbing rebellious in the set bodies. However, the derogatory claims of these bodies’ responses (specifically to the uterus) can be traced back to Ancient Egypt; they named it: “Hysteria” . This genre of study focused on analysis of the female’s irritable paralysed body, their neurotic epilepsies, tantrums, and indeterminate conditions, in relations to the “mind”, therefore, to “cure” the bodies specialists places natural "nerve placebos", herbal extracts, beside or into the body's openings (mouth, nose, or vagina) —— the linkage (machine) has been injected. This is indeed a Cartesian dualistic mind-body position (brain governs the body parts), that the body treatment of directly intervening dismisses the considerations of the constantly changing affects within and the inter-association between and of the multiple “brain” and “body”.

Machines are reality converting devices, actualizing potential often by using tools to convert energy, in often automatic systems via manipulating resources, ideas, procedures, senses of the world, and the agency through the establishment of mechanical processes that facilitate the reform and revaluation of methods and expressions that express the fusion of human consciousness with energy converting devices. These energy converting devices in effect reshape the landscape of human possibilities, aesthetic experiences, ethical realities, and social environments, through the agency of the machine or through the mechanical process.. Machine Aesthetic architecture and Machine engineered creations: Machines to drive us to work, Machines to sip Can we be free of the influence of machines ever, how embroiled are we in the language and experience of progress so much so that we depend on the mechanisms that instantiate our creative options, and with this much automation ARE they indeed CREATIVE options? Lastly is the human being essentially nothing more than a machine and if so how is it that we experience free will, the likes of which is free to redesign a lo-tech life, to reiterate are we ever free to be free of technology. Are we in a sense a civilization of Cyborgs?

Artificial intelligence has been depicted in film for decades. It embodies the tension in our societies between interest, enthusiasm, scepticism and anxiety about the technologies we have created and which surround us every day. Hollywood imagery exists alongside productions in all types of genres, from sci-fi to melodrama, that depict machines controlling the most intimate aspects of our lives.